Inline Skating and the Doublepush
I thought I knew how to inline skate. I had some coaching from a good speed skater. I can snowski skate quite nicely. But I realized just a little while ago that I’m only on first base in skating. I got 20th in a citizen race and I can now beat my brother who got 9th, but I still don’t know how. But now I have a bunch of great new clues that I’ll share with you. They can help your ice and snow skating, too, some of them.
You have to first work to get comfy in the down position, arms behind back. It can be relaxing. I like it. It doesn’t even take much training to adapt to. You just have to ‘cut the strings’ and let your weight rest on your thighs.
I bought Rollerblades in 1985, about when they were first released. And immediately went on 20 mile skates on them in the Rockies. I used them with ski poles. More fun than rollerskis, which had already been around for years. I used to Blade in with bicycle packs for miles, at 17mph.
I lost quite a bit of blood over the years, too. But nothing major.
It took me years to learn to use the brake, though. I never liked braking. But in hills with stopsigns at the bottom, you need em. Good thing it’s real easy to use.
First, figure out which is your natural brake foot. I find that I can easily coast on just my right foot and twist it around with confidence, with the left in the air—so that’s my natural coasting foot. If I try to coast on my left foot, I get wobbly. I found that my left foot was good for the detail work of braking, so it’s my natural braking foot. I had to change the side my brake was mounted on. (I’m a lefty anyway.) To brake, you drop down and put your hands low and to the front, then shove your braking foot forward and rock it back onto the brake. Glide on the glide foot. Modulate braking pressure as needed.
Then I heard that long skates are faster, and fast wheels and bearings were finally available. So I tried to convert my old Blades into speeders. I cut them down in height. I drilled them out for lightness and ventilation. I cut the rivets and rebolted the frame into a new longer position. And I bought new wheels and bearings. Wow, what a difference! For some years, these modified old skates seemed fine and fast. Then they got rusty and slow. They always were kind of stupid and duct-tapey.
I saw an ad finally for 5-wheel Italian leather skates in a bike catalog. Closeout. $300 down to $150. I jumped. They fit great and flew like the wind.
I started applying some of my icespeeding and snowskating principles to inlining as best I could. Doing it myself. I ended up with a style where I shoved each glide skate as far down the road as I could. Then as I started to power I shoved again forward down the road. When done powering, I let each skate just fly up. I could use my hips to really help lever myself over each skate and let er rip.
Then I started hearing about this new technique called the Doublepush on the Internet. I looked into it. I got pointers. I got confused. I tried to figure out what they meant. I asked the main newsgroup how to do it. An hour later I got a phone call from Gordon Sanders, a coach in Dallas, who explained everything! What a sport! They really are quite gungho and organized. He pointed me to a good book called ‘Speed on Skates’ by Barry Publow, as well as really helped explain what I was seeing on those websites. He encouraged me to download the complete 3-6mb video clips off of Doublepush.com to see what was going down. Also, he said to take an Eddy Matzger clinic. $150 and two days of killer training from the champ…plus $100 worth of topflight wheels and $50 worth of topflight bearings and lots of other freebies. What a deal! Look at what good pro sponsorship can do for a clinic, hey?
Anyway, I think I’m on my way to figuring some of this out.
The first essential is the Heel Carve. Power out through your heel and only through your heel. In fact, it’s so much heel that ideally your stroke ends up IN FRONT OF your hip and out to the side and your toe wheels should come off the pavement FIRST. —My clever self-teaching ended up with me throwing my skate to the rear with the toe being last to leave—that’s how I got so much forward push. Forget the extreme forward push. Stepping thru is just fine. At the end of your stroke your skate should be PARALLEL to your line of travel. On wet pavement your tracks should look like inward-pointing C’s. Most folks look like outward-pointing, so did mine until now. I’d heard about something like this, but now I see what they mean.
The doublepush solves the following problem: in classic technique, after you push, you glide. But here a fact gets in the way: whenever you’re gliding, you’re slowing down. The DP fixes that by doing away with gliding! With DP, you’re always applying power.
What DP really does is introduce a wide variety of synchopations into skate technique that were never there before. It was a rather rigid technique. Now, you can mix up your beat/power timings to fit the terrain. It’s a lot like what skating did to XC and what V2 skiskating does as compared with V1/A or offset. It has really opened things up.
It’s faster and it’s easier. It’s more relaxing. Another big trick is that when you glide, your muscles are tense and this is when the scientists have figured out that lactic acid builds up. Gliding seems relaxing, but it’s not. Steady work is better. Always keep your feet in motion.
There’s still something about DP that I don’t get, but it will come. So let’s start there in explaining the technique:
#1. You start with your recovery foot swung behind your powering foot. That looks funny.
#2. You then swing that recovery foot forward and let yourself start to fall. You accumulate inertia this way. You land with a ‘preload’ on the new power foot with the foot on the SAME SIDE of your centerline as the side of the body the foot comes from. Usually, with all the banking and body sway that we do, we set a skate down well across the centerline. Right skate sets down on left side. With DP, skate sets down right on right. The foot is rather right below your chest. You drop down onto it. While you’re still finishing up powering with the other foot.
#3. You drop onto the outside edge and angle that foot pigeontoed a bit. Power it over across your chest and push it forward at the same time. As far as you can before the point of no return. Your other foot is now done with its stroke. This cross-body powerphase of the new foot is what replaces the glide phase of the old classic technique.
#4. When your foot is farthest across, carve with your heel, change edges and bring it back across again in a normal power stroke (only it’s longer coz it started further across your body) (and don’t forget to heel carve here, too). Old power skate is now flung up behind the new power skate and is getting ready to ‘fall’ down…. Repeat cycle.
The path that your skates now take is an S-path, with two heel carves per stroke.
The biggest trick in the DP, is the same-side set-down. When you get that figured out—and I think that the swingof the recovery skate has something essential to do with making it easy—then I think it all comes together.
Some people suggest that monkeying with DP messes up your classic, but who cares. Everyone is doing it. It looks cool. It works. There’s something to it. So give it a try!
A good drill is to practice propelling yourself on one foot like the stuntskaters do. It’s their easiest trick, so don’t worry. Just stand on one foot and do heel carves with the same foot from left to right. To make it easier on yourself, you can do another drill with both feet at once. —Push both feet in together at the same time, then bank them and push them outwards. You can snakey yourself along this way and get used to the double heel carve and the doublepush.
Watch the video clips, read the Internet articles, buy a book, take a clinic. Then you’ll really have it.
Try a criterium style city course inline race! Those things are tight and fast. They make a bike crit look spacious! It looks like fun to me! The sprints go about 30mph and they’re as wild as any bike race.
It’s a more convivial sport as well, let us say. There are more girls involved and the packs are packed much tighter, so if that doesn’t scare you, you might actually like it! The inline race I went to seemed much like a bike race, only friendlier and with more kids and girls around, plus more older people. And these kids and oldsters finish way high up, too. It’s a big tent sport.
